On July 18, thousands of people marched in Detroit to stop water shutoffs by a private company that manages the city’s water system.

The city of Detroit went bankrupt many months ago, thanks to the federal (and state government of Michigan) enacting legislation championed by Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden and many other class warriors of the 1 percent ensconced in congress.

The result has been a massive shipment of jobs overseas via free trade treaties. When jobs are shipped overseas, and Wyden is not the dumb dumb he pretends to be on this issue, the difference between the old higher US wages and the new lower overseas wages is redistributed to the 1 percent via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and surging share prices. It also redistributes the tax dollars those shipped jobs once supported in the USA straight into the pockets of the rich, leaving schools, fire, police, road maintenance and other government services crippled, which is why Detroit went bankrupt. Thank you Wall Street Senator Wyden!

These legislative policies have left the people of Detroit poor, and let’s face it, Detroit was once one of the great manufacturing cities of the world until Wyden and others in congress shipped the jobs overseas. However, Wyden’s actions have generated massive income and wealth inequality via his income redistribution actions.

That’s the ultimate reason why many people in Detroit can’t pay their water bills, why the city went bankrupt, and why the Dow Jones and other financial markets are surging. It’s a rigged economic and political game. The problem with the people in Detroit is that all, or almost all, the democracy in the state and federal governments have already been purchased in the political markets.

There is a straight forward relationship between tax cuts for the rich and growing income and wealth inequality. The conduit for financial inequality is the political markets. Tax cuts for the rich allowed them to corrupt the federal and state governments to the core. The rich used their ill gotten gains from Reagan’s tax cuts to purchase legislation in the political markets that redistribute income and wealth from people like you and me and “Aunt Millie” to the CEO’s and shareholders of corporations, namely the 1 percent. This legislation included free trade treaties that shipped jobs overseas, reducing labor costs while increasing profits. The legislation included privatization scams, deregulation schemes, and actions toward war, such as in Iraq, and Afghanistan, both of which are extremely profitable to the one percent. The rich also purchased the No Child Left Behind Act, which benefited only the major publishing corporations of educational books and tests, such as McGraw-Hil, and the McGraws have been neighbors and best friends of the Bush’s since the Great Depression. Yes, that’s precisely how corrupt President George W. Bush was. There are a ton more legislation that has been purchased by the one percent to redistribute income and wealth to themselves from the 99 percent, but I don’t have that much space. That’s why the economic and political markets are a rigged game.

The press has been a tool of the 1 percent, used to mislead and lie us into wars, deregulation, free trade agreements, privatization, anti-labor union tirades, as well as poisoning ourselves with GMOs by claiming they’re harmless, regardless of what all independent studies show. Yes, they lie to us a lot.

All of this corruption has sent the Dow Jones higher, as well as the NASDAQ and other financial markets. All of which benefits the 1 percent.

This type of information you can get from from foreign news outlets, such as the Guardian of the UK. But the American press is corrupt to the core. That’s why it helped to lie us into a war in Iraq, and they’ve lied to us about public education reform for over thirty years.

It’s all because of the need to generate ever increasing profits for the 1 percent, and all at the expense of the 99 percent, either in terms of health, money, or education. In other words, due to a news media cartel, the information we’ve been fed and not fed has been carefully cultivated to reflect a world view that best allows the 1 percent and Wall Street to redistribute our money, our wealth, our tax dollars, our jobs, and our health to the 1 percent.

Blame it on President Bill Clinton. He signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed the consolidation of major media outlets so that 5 corporations now successfully collude to determine what we are allowed to see on roughly 90 percent of all media outlets. That’s right. Five corporations now own 90 percent of all news outlets.

That’s precisely how the massive income and wealth inequality has been covered up, and, in the case of public schools, how we’ve been kept ignorant about how our schools and children have been used as conduits toward enhancing the corporate profits of the testing industry via the testing craze, and how our schools have been become nothing more than laboratories for keeping students focused only on testing, rather than on things more important, such as critical thinking, art, shop, and basic living skills. Rhetoric to the side, this is precisely what education reform is all about.

Most people don’t know that the No Child Left Behind Act was the business plan of McGraw-Hill, and that the McGraws had been long-time friends of the Bush family. And this is precisely why President Bush pushed the act through congress and signed it into law. It was a convenient piece of legislation that redistributed income, tax dollars, and wealth to his personal friends, while leaving our schools wrecked. The corporate press wasn’t going to ever tell you that, thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act” bill is up for a vote before the Senate this week. Thirty-five senators endorse the bill. The Wall Street Republican Party will, no doubt, vote as a block against the middle class on this issue. Wall Street and investors of the 1 percent hold billions of dollars of bonds backed by student loans. Lowering student loan interest rates will reduce the value of the bonds, as well as the return on interest paid to the bondholders. In addition, lowering student loan rates on existing loans will also quash the desire to purchase student loan backed bonds, so the best thing for Wall Street and the rich is to artificially keep student loan interest rates higher than would otherwise be the case. Let’s be clear to one thing. Some Democrats will likely vote against the bill. It would be a shock if Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden voted for it.

Executives at the testing giant corporation known as Pearson want to increase their profits by testing student teachers, which is utterly stupid since student teachers already need to pass a battery of education classes, a three month or longer apprenticeship as a student teacher under the guidance of at least one experienced teacher. In addition, to obtain their teacher’s licenses, they already need to pass at least two national examinations. One education professor had enough of Pearson’s garbage.

Labor Notes now reports, “The new statewide president of the 110,000-member Massachusetts teachers’ union made her name leading a boycott of standardized tests.

She’s calling for a three-year moratorium on high-stakes testing, meaning tests that carry heavy consequences under the guise of “accountability”—for instance, holding students’ graduation, school funding, or teachers’ compensation for ransom.

Barbara Madeloni was running the teacher education program at the University of Massachusetts in 2012 when she led her student teachers to boycott a pilot standardized assessment for teachers-in-training. The boycotters opposed outsourcing teacher evaluation to the testing giant Pearson, preferring that experienced educators observe student teachers.

The current mania to test, test and more test students is driven by the need to redistribute income from taxpayers to the rich shareholders of such testing giants as Pearson and McGraw-Hill. It’s all about profits, and has nothing to do with education reform or improving the the education of students. In fact, it was McGraw-Hills business plan that was adopted by the Bush administration, and became No Child Left Behind. This was the result of over 70 years of friendship between the Bush and McGraw families, and had nothing to do with improving education. It seems the testing mania has ruined public education.

Norway is one of the most prosperous nations in the world; its citizens enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, and it is one of the most highly taxed nations in the world. Those high taxes mean the rich don’t have enough money to purchase enough politicians to redistribute the income and wealth of the 99 percent to the 1 percent in Norway, like they do in the United States, using both political parties.

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The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed

Wall Street is up to no good, and has been since 1980, when it took over the Republican Party, and then the Democratic Party in 1994. Income has been massively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via legislative scam after scam, from tax cuts for the rich to international income redistribution schemes falsely labeled as trade agreements. In The Rigged Game, John Hively exposes how this has all come about starting with a revolutionary, but simple reality, all recessions begin in the financial markets.